


the wine-dark sea

by snagov



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angels Becoming Humans, Angst, Cancer, Character Death, Elegy, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Love, M/M, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:08:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25555579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: Even love stories must have a final chapter.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 51





	the wine-dark sea

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: This fic features a major character death that is not undone nor resolved, please be forewarned.

_“You remember too much,_   
_my mother said to me recently._   
_Why hold onto all that? And I said,_   
_Where can I put it down?”_

― Anne Carson, _Glass, Irony and God_

_Red, tell me that story again. How does it go?_

_There’s only one chapter left. Here, take some of these apples instead. I got them for you, they’re the kind you like._

_No, tell me the end. I want to hear how it ends._

_Very well._

* * *

“Well?” The real estate agent asks, keys in her polished hand.

“I’ll take it,” Crowley says. He has red hair and a sharp chin. 

It is a cottage in the South Downs. He breathes in the air. Fresh. Good for the constitution. The sun tips his chin up, kisses his thin cheek. He likes the place. The little garden. The sunflower field. Thistles and marigolds. (Once, long ago, on a nameless day, there had been a picnic. Aziraphale had plucked the wild thistle, sucked a petal into his mouth. He had taught Crowley how a thistle tastes like honey, how to suck it out.) He lingers by the cottage until the sun begins to set, gleaming orange as fire on the Bentley's slick paint.

Time to go.

Let’s go then. Where are we going?

Crowley comes home and everything is in place, just as he’d left it. He breathes easier. 

“Did you like it?” Aziraphale asks, looking up from his chair. The light is on next to him, the afghan in his lap (he had knitted it himself).

“Yeah, S'nice.”

“Good.”

“Gonna buy it.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, my dear. I’m so glad it suited.”

“You hungry, angel?”

“Famished. What are you thinking?”

* * *

It had been a Tuesday. Crowley hates Tuesdays.

“Open wide. Say _ahhh._ ”

Let us paint a room in only white. Crowley shifts uneasily, leaning against the walls. He is the only dark spot in the room. The paper sheet on the bed is white. The little gown they have given Aziraphale is white. There are white cotton balls. White Q-Tips. White sneakers. White smiles. The clinic smells like bandages and bleach. Crowley tips his head back and stares at the white of the popcorn ceiling tiles. Everything is wrapped in plastic. He can watch Aziraphale’s heartbeat on the monitor, know the exact measure of his blood pressure and temperature. All these numbers, all these measurements, yet he still doesn’t know what is going on. Aziraphale squeezes his hand, knowing that Crowley hates this place. His eyes are blue. His skin is pink. He is a colorful respite in all this awful white.

“You don’t have to come,” Aziraphale says. After. 

Crowley shrugs. He doesn’t know how to twist his mouth to mean two things. He doesn’t want to go. He wants to go. So he half-lies. “I know,” he says. “I want to.” (He also says _I’ll be there,_ which has never been a lie.) When they get back to the bookshop, Crowley takes his sunglasses off and sets them on the occasional table. The light freckles his irises.

Go on, look. See for yourself.

They are green. 

He had known the change instantly. Felt himself scaled down to size. Crowley had gotten out of bed and his neck had ached from sleeping funny. He had needed to use the toilet. He had smelled of sweat and bad breath. 

Human things. 

They had learned to be human. To do things the human way. They made dinner and minded the knives. They drank two bottles instead of seven. When Crowley drives, he only slightly goes over the speed limit. They have learned to fuck like humans. To make love. Crowley is careful to spend time with Aziraphale’s body, coaxing and gentling, convincing Aziraphale’s body that Crowley belongs there and has always belonged there, deep inside of him. When he takes Aziraphale, his hips and thighs get tired now. Their skin chafes. They adapt, change positions, learn new ways.

Humans have done it for thousands of years, after all. They could too. 

* * *

Tell me a tale of a shipwreck man. Tell me of a whiplash creature who likes to haunt the docks, his hands shoved into his skinny jean pockets. If we must tell an ending, let us gather up everything. He had thought he might escape this. The end. He had lived a lifetime of beginnings and middles, starting over and over again. After the kiss, the first night, we fade to black, waving our hands at a happy ending. 

We have told so many beginnings. Someone has to tell the end. 

Let me tell you how it goes. 

There had been a leper colony here once, close to the shore. They had been locked in, locked away, told _don’t call us, we’ll call you._ No one needs the colonies anymore. The beds are empty. The doors rusted shut. Science had shut it down, shut it up, written a prescription with a treatment.Crowley swallows, looking out at the water. The waves come. They do not end. There are lines under his eyes, at his mouth. He leans closer to the mirror now, doubting his own face, wondering where they had come from. The skin cracks around his knuckles. Hangnails bother him. 

_Bury us together,_ Patroclus had asked, _don’t let us be torn apart._

_They can’t separate us,_ Achilles said, brushing back Patroclus’ pale hair. _You’re my heart and heel. My greatest strength. My biggest weakness. You fool, look, you’re gonna be fine, I can carry you._

Later, Achilles will drag Hector’s body in circles, screaming at the sky. You cannot tie cancer to the back of a chariot, so Crowley keeps his fists in his pockets. He watches the waves, the bleak water. The endlessness of this wine-dark sea.

* * *

It starts in the bone. 

Crowley had never been good at paying attention. _Osteosarcoma_ they call it. He nods as if he understands and looks it up later.

Only one question matters. 

“How long?”

“Six months.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“No.”

The word _comfortable_ becomes their currency. _Are you comfortable? Am I? Let me get you a pillow, a glass of water._ We cannot reach in with a knife, scrape out the cancer ourselves, so we soften the blow. The doctors say it over and over and over again. _We can make him comfortable. A_ ziraphale, your body has gone off the tracks. Lost the recipe. Making too much of you in all the wrong places. The cancer doesn’t know when to stop. Doesn’t care. It will break off and rattle. 

In the beginning, Crowley keeps an eye on Aziraphale like a private dick. He doesn’t seem sick. Nothing seems to have changed. It’s hard to trust the doctors. He knows he shouldn’t hope that they’re wrong, that inertia will bear out and nothing will change. He can’t help hoping. None of us can. The cancer sits in Aziraphale’s body. A ticking bomb. A landline. One day it will blow.

The end comes slowly, takes its time. (Sometimes Crowley just wants it to be over. He bites his lip with sharp teeth and hates himself for the thought.)

“Tell me about the cottage," Aziraphale asks, resting in the bed. He rests often now. When he bathes, Crowley helps wash his hair.

“It’s small. Cozy. You’ll like it. Enough shelves for your books, promise.”

“It sounds absolutely lovely. And the garden? Out back?”

“In a bloody _state._ The previous owners had no idea what they were doing. Needs a lot of work, angel.”

“You’ll make it wonderful.”

Crowley shifts, changes the subject. “Are you hungry? Want dinner?”

“Are you cooking?”

“Yeah, if you like.”

He makes roast chicken. Stands in the center of the kitchen under the bright lights, his hands dirty. The eight classical pieces of a chicken are the two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, and the two breasts. Suddenly, everything he’d ever learned about breaking down a chicken vanishes. He knows to check for the ball under the wing, but why? Where do you begin to place your knife to separate the leg from the breast? Where do you slice to go through the leg joint between thigh and drumstick? How do you come apart?

* * *

Crowley gets used to hospitals and waiting rooms. The days draw out. He had assumed they would go too quickly. Instead, he pulls the blue blanket up around Aziraphale’s soft shoulders, instead they stare at each other and the walls, twiddling away the hours. 

“Do you wanna watch something?”

“Read to me?” Aziraphale asks. His hands are too tired to hold a book. The IVs pain him. So he does. When Aziraphale falls asleep, Crowley closes his eyes. Black. He sees black in a world of white. 

(How black? As black as what Jonah saw inside of the whale.)

Crowley brings several books in their packed hospital bag. A change of clothes, a toothbrush. Charles Dickens too. 

He reads for an hour. “What will you do?” Aziraphale asks. He does not say _after._ The _after_ is always implied.

“Dunno,” Crowley says. _This is the wrong book,_ he wants to say. Yell it. Shout it. Pound it out. This is the wrong poem, the wrong story. _Look, you’ve given me the wrong script. This can’t be right. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not fair._

“Do you remember that night in Rome,” Aziraphale asks. He smiles and puts a hand over Crowley’s own. “When you told me how you made the stars?”

_Yes. I remember._

Starlight: A recipe  
Carbon  
Nitrogen  
Oxygen  
Heat  
Pressure  
You  
Me

It rains on his way home. He is shivering and miserable and wretched too. There are two tea mugs on the counter from a week ago. From another lifetime when there were two here to drink from them.

Why does it go so slow? 

It doesn’t go the way it does in movies. Aziraphale does not say _I love you_ and close his eyes, going gently into that good night. It is slow. There are good days and bad. Sometimes he forgets Crowley’s name, sometimes everything at once. He falls in the shower. The oxygen makes it hard to kiss him, so Crowley kisses his hand. The top of his head. The skin grows grey. Shutting down each system. Here we go round the prickly bush. Making our way through the empty house of our bodies, looking back, turning out each light. 

At the end of it all, the sky is still blue. He doesn't understand.

“Do you want to have a service?” The hospital chaplain asks.

Crowley is very tired. “No.”

“My prayers are with you,” the chaplain says. “Take comfort, he lived a good life. He was loved.”

A good life. What are the qualifications? To love and be loved. We say, _oh look how long they lived, they had a good run._ Crowley thinks of Aziraphale’s middle-aged smile. He had been on earth for six-thousand years. He thinks of that bright laugh. They could have gone longer. How many years cut free? Five. Five years since the Apocalypse had been averted. _Just kids. We were just kids. I’m sorry I never took you to that restaurant in Swansea. I’m sorry that I never cooked you that recipe. There was always tomorrow. Then there wasn’t._

After, after, Crowley learns that funerals are for the living. There is no service. When he buys the pine box, they throw condolences in too. He visits to say goodbye to the empty casket. These are not his bones. Aziraphale’s bones are a pile of ash in his pocket. He comes to the casket and closes his eyes in the impression of prayer. Counts the beat of the seconds. Make it long enough. Make it look real. Psalms are printed on the tissues. He wipes his eyes with Romans 6:3-9. 

_I miss you._

He wants to cry. It doesn’t happen. He sits at the bar, whiskey in hand. The pressure builds in his chest, his throat, with nowhere to go. The other patrons get used to him. They become gentle, given to misty-eyed, tender treatment as if he might shatter under view. To pass the time, he takes notes on taxonomy. _Homo sapien. Dendanathema x morifolium._ The Latin rolls off his tongue like pearls. In the emptiness of his yet-undefined future, he savors control in classification systems. _What am I? Who are you?_ He hates the amorphous nature of himself, consistently changeable. 

_Dear Aziraphale,  
_ _I love you. I thought there’d be more to this. I thought there’d be more to say. Here, I have learned the words of every language, practiced in stories and poetry and songs. My tongue is unprepared. Tripped up. I trip and my words scatter like Babel. All I scoop up, save to give to you, is I love you._

Grief is strange. It is not constant. Crowley wakes some mornings and the day is bright. Calm. He makes a pot of coffee. He goes for a run. Does the laundry. It comes in the small things. A hair on a coat. A silvery-white hair. Crowley picks it off the dark fabric and holds it up in the afternoon light. _Hair. Your hair. Yours. Your body, down in the earth. This is all I have. This is all I get to keep._

How can he throw it away? How can he take this, the last foothold of Aziraphale in the world, and knock it to the ground? Sweep it up? Throw it in the garbage?

He can’t.

Crowley sits on the floor, surrounded by half-folded laundry and one hair in his hand. 

It has been weeks. At last, he cries. 

* * *

_How many pages are left, Red?_

_Not many. Be patient. Keep listening._

* * *

  
  


The cottage’s soil had needed work. He brought in topsoil and fertilizer, turning the dirt over in his hands. It moves from grey to black. Good earth, made for growth. Crowley spends long afternoons in the sun, sunburn picking at his ears and pale neck. He picks the rocks out, pulls the weeds. Sprays the roses with Miracle-Gro. 

He plants an apple tree. Just for good measure. _Wish you'd seen it. You'd have loved it, angel. Could've picked the fruit right from the branch, made your tarte tatin._

Someone tells him to sleep with a pillow pulled against him. As if he might trick himself into thinking a sack of goose feathers dressed up in cotton might be a substitute for Aziraphale. It is not a living thing. Not the broad, warm spread of his back, dusted with fine yellow hairs. It does not move. Does not breathe. It is not warm. 

That side of the bed is empty. Crowley stares at it. Nights seem longer, even when he does sleep. He takes to sleeping on the sofa. It’s smaller there, less room for emptiness. There is the phrase _to feel empty inside._ Crowley has never known what that meant. Now it makes sense. The measure of love is loss. Aziraphale’s bones have overflowed, made too much. Crowley is hollow. His bones have been cored out to store his love, to carry it around with him. Now that it is gone, he walks carefully, empty and aching. His bones feel as fragile as glass. 

_I loved you like an infection. Like an illness, an abscess. I loved you and it hollowed out pieces of me, making a home for itself. When you left, you left no forwarding address. I have so much I want to tell you. Give me a little ballast, sand or saltwater._ It has been said that some have died of a broken heart. He knows now that they had had holes bored in by love, that they had sprung a leak and found nothing to plug it. 

And he would do it all again. Love is a story that is true. That has happened. Love is a history and history repeats itself.

So we must tell it again. 

* * *

“Just the coffee, sir?” The young man asks, wrapped in an apron and customer service.

“Yeah.”

“Nice out, isn’t it? How’s your day going?”

A shrug. “Guess I’m doing fine.”

He heads home, driving too quickly and stopping to put petrol in the Bentley. He sits with the coffee between two narrow, black-jeaned knees. A ball flies over the garden wall. It rolls to land at the tip of his boot. Crowley leans forward, taking it in a straight and narrow hand. At the wall, two boys. Red hair on one. Blond on the other. They live down the block, in houses next to each other, kicking cans up the asphalt road.

“Sorry,” they say. “Didn’t mean to.”

“Here," he says, handing the ball back. They look nervous. "Don’t worry about it”

“Are those apples?”

“Hmm?" He glances back at the tree standing in the sun. "Yep, sure are."

“Can we have some?”

“Sure, if you want. Careful, there are a few sour spots. Haven’t worked out all the kinks yet.”

He leaves the fence unlocked. The garden is open, you know, you can go back. 

What happens after? He moves the mugs from one side of the counter to the other. In the sink and out again. He forgets to wash them. He tries to not think about an afterlife. There are Heaven and Hell and Crowley doesn’t know if he belongs to one or the other. If Aziraphale does, if they will meet again. He doesn’t know if, perhaps, there’s nothing for them at all. What if it just stops? The curtain falls and we fade to black, not even aware of our non-existence. The conductor calls _last stop, end of the line, everyone out,_ and we have to leave the train. 

Fade to black. Cut the tape, cut to nothing. In the beginning, before he was Created, everything was black and dense. 

(How black? As black as the wound, necrotic and dark.)

* * *

The Body. Cells, tissues, systems, bones. (Crowley studies it all, from vagus nerve to synovial fluid. He knows the parts. He cannot put them back together.) 

Cancer is a wreck is a ruin is a cataclysm is a catastrophe in the body. God had said _go forth and multiply_ but She hadn’t set an upper limit. Aziraphale, within your body, the cells of your bones have gone rogue. One cell becoming two, over and over and over again. Mitosis is a dirty word. The oncologist had held up the images of Aziraphale’s hip, poking at the jagged edges of x marking the spot. A tumor. The bullet in the bone, already stuck. _It looks like a sunburst,_ the oncologist says. 

Crowley has always thought that Aziraphale had swallowed the sun. Later that night, Aziraphale reaches for him in the dark. 

“Is it okay?”

“Yes.”

“Can I touch you here?” _(Is it okay? Will you tear?)_

“Yes. Just go slow.”

Crowley kisses him like a bruised plum. Afraid of tearing the skin. _Look, here I am, inside of you. Tell me where to go, who to fight. I’ll climb the stairs of you, take your vertebrae two by two. I’m here. Why can’t I fix it? I have hands to dig. A bottle of Elmer’s glue. Scotch tape. Got a needle and thread, I can sew you back up. The archaeologists can put shattered pottery back together. Piece the amphora back bit by bit. We can restore a painting from centuries ago. Why can’t I sail on your blood, looking for traitors?_

The mix together in the dark. The river of crystal light into the sea of dew. Crowley touches Aziraphale, making a recipe. Write it down, cough it up. What makes you up? Two parts skin and one part muscle. The skin is the largest organ of the body and the one Crowley knows best. He marks off each dip and divot, the tan of Aziraphale’s forearms. His hands know. His tongue knows. His eyes, his nose. Crowley is an apt pupil. He marks off each scar, kissing them to bookmark them. Later, he will turn to this page, ask _this one, what happened, how did you get this one?_

Why are our bodies only marked by pain? By injury? When we kiss, it does not leave a mark. Crowley asks Aziraphale to bite him, to bruise him. Not for the pain but just to leave a bookmark. A little note he can turn back to later. He can stand in front of the mirror and read the marginalia of the bite, a love letter in teeth. _Don’t worry,_ the bruise says, _it was real. I was here. I loved you once. I will love you again._

The skin. A notebook to scribble in, to scribble on. The cancerous body hurts easily. Crowley is gentle where he touches, careful where he puts his hands. He knows that he is making love to nitrogen and oxygen. Who is the spirit that moves you? He studies every medical text, trying to learn the names of the bones and where they go. How to put them back. 

(Don’t drop that, you’ll never get it back together.)

Crowley knows the bones, he knows them all. The occipital bone and mandible, the patella and the stapes. _Let me name every part of you, let me show the light to your dark places._ He kisses Aziraphale’s shoulder blades. They do not have wings. Not anymore, not like this, but these bones remind Crowley of wings. Scapulae, bone wings jutting from your back. Someday we might evolve to fly. 

* * *

Ash. _Where are you going and what do you wish?_ The sky is clear and Crowley can name every constellation in the firmament. He had put them there and lived under his own light. The chalk-white hills of the Seven Sisters gleam bright behind him, the waves of the wine-dark sea lick at his boot.

He pulls a small container from the pocket of his jacket.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. His hands are sharp with angles and he spreads the ashes over the water. The stars glimmer in the darkness, a mirrored black and endless night. Stars like herring fish, waiting for nets of silver and gold. 

Close your eyes. Don’t be afraid. Sail that beautiful sea.

* * *

I don’t want to stop there. Rewind the tape. Pick it up here instead. Three months ago, they had lingered over a bookshop. The leather sofa. The wingback chair. There’s a bottle of wine between them, there’s laughter in their mouths. I won’t bore you with the details. Look at the equation, reduce it to bare facts. Two men sit laughing in Soho. One with red hair. One with white. 

(How red? As red as what Moses saw, burning a bush.

How white? As white as a dove, come back from the Flood.)

Aziraphale’s face has grown thinner. Crowley reaches out with his open palm to touch his cheek. _I love you,_ he thinks and it hums in his chest. He can hear his heartbeat singing _I love you I love you I love you._ The sun comes through the curtains. The shadows are long in the gold of the afternoon light. There are four walls. Four walls and no map. This is the Ark on the waves, sailing out on the dark sea. Stay in the boat, where it is safe. Keep an eye on the water. We don’t get to know where we are.

Aziraphale falls asleep next to him, head fallen upon his shoulder. Crowley brushes the hair from his forehead, weaving their fingers together. He can hang on. Hang on for now. When they go to bed that night, he says _I love you_ like it is oxygen. It’s too big of a phrase, never gets the details right. The nitty-gritty. He kisses Aziraphale and says _I love you_ to the roof of his mouth, the calcium of his teeth. _I love you_ to the bend of his belly, to his elbow, the spot behind his ear. 

_I love you. I love you. I love you. This is your history, that you loved and were loved._

* * *

_Is it over, Red? Is that the last page?_

_Yes._

_How do you know?_

_I wrote it._

* * *

  
  


This is how it ends. How we close the book.

I wish I had something more to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Reposted with permission.


End file.
